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Here's the problem I have with this: it only makes a good story if you ignore the full story.

First, all the diplomat is claiming is that he and a special forces team were told not to board the C-130 that flew that night from Tripoli to Benghazi. The C-130 itself took off, landed at Benghazi, and collected the Americans holed up there, and also collected the body of Ambassador Stevens which was delivered to the airport by the local hospital.

Second, who or what was on that plane wouldn't have made any difference for Ambassador Stevens and the other foreign service officer who was killed in the first attack, because they were already dead, probably within an hour of the start of the first attack. The plane might have arrived in Benghazi in time for the special forces team to make the trip from the airport to the CIA annex where the Americans had retreated, and they might have got there before the mortar attack that killed two more Americans, but what good would they have done? They just would have been more targets for the mortars. Does anybody doubt the best option at the time was to evacuate the annex, which had come under mortar fire, and get everybody to the plane and out of Benghazi? Why send a team of special forces from the airport to the annex first, exposing them to attack and ambush on the way, so that they could join the soldiers at the annex in hunkering down under mortar fire until they were all sent back to the airport?

Finally, the diplomat goes off on some speculative tangent about how they might have scared the attackers off if they'd launched an F-16 or something, which has nothing to do with him being denied a seat on the C-130. I don't see why this guy's opinion about what kind of aircraft the military should have or could have deployed should matter, he wasn't in a position to evaluate those options, he was a diplomat on the other side of the country.

This reporting seems unnecessarily sensationalistic to me. His testimony is not really a contradiction of anything the administration has said or the report of the Review Board. He's just offering his civilian opinion of military decisions that were made, without a very good argument for why those decisions were wrong.

He's just helping Issa throw chum in the water, as far as I can see.

EDIT: Reading about the testimony of Hicks, I see that the flight from Tripoli didn't arrive until after the two men were killed by the mortar, so there's no way having this special forces team on the flight would have saved lives. Also, the Pentagon is saying that the "special forces team" was four men armed only with pistols who were on a tour of the region and not combat-ready.

This is starting to look really ugly. Nobody familiar with the timeline of events in Benghazi that night would be surprised or alarmed by this information, but Issa is serving it up as a scandal and the media, at least CBS so far, seems eager to play along.